Years of Experimentation, Recognition, and Torment

in Britain: 1960–1964

During those years, he experimented ceaselessly, each paint-ing a new adventure. he left little to chance, studypaint-ing how the

intensity, texture, and overall area of certain colors interacted.

—Katharine Kuh

In 1921, Duncan Phillips offered the city of Washington, D.c., both his private residence and his personal collection, opening to the public what would be known as the Phillips collection. he assembled his collection, one of the first in the United states devoted to modern art, in an extremely original way that revealed his patience as well as his contradictions. “it is worthwhile,” Phillips wrote in describing his plans, “to re-verse the usual process of popularizing an art gallery. instead of the academic grandeur of marble halls and stairways and miles of chairless spaces, with low standards and popular attractions

to draw the crowds, we plan to try the effect of domestic archi-tecture, or rooms small or at least livable.”¹

it was Theodore stamos, one of the “irascibles,” who first drew the collector’s attention to Rothko, pointing out obvious parallels between him and Pierre Bonnard, of whom Phillips was quite fond. “i told him that i think it’s important that he gets at least one [Rothko], and i told him why.” he added that Rothko was “so strongly related to Bonnard that if he looked at some black and white Bonnards he would see it clearer, and then focus on the color. We discussed that for a long time.”² Phillips noticed that the areas of flat color in Rothko’s works typically were boundless and intuitively structured within a confined space, much as they were in Bonnard’s. in 1957 Phillips held a group show—his first exhibition that included Rothko—

and he purchased two of the artist’s paintings that were on

christopher Rothko)

years of experimentation and torment

play: No. 16/No. 12 (Mauve Intersection), 1949, and No. 7 (Green and Maroon), 1953. Three years later he acquired No. 16 (Henna and Green/Green and Red on Tangerine), 1956, and Orange and Red on Red, 1957, from a solo exhibition held at the Phillips collection May 4–31, 1960. With the three 1950s paintings he created a separate “Rothko Room” in the museum, devoting one wall to each painting (a fourth painting was added in 1964).

seating was arranged so that viewers could settle comfortably in front of the canvases for as long as they wished. The room was painted gray and lit dimly in order to enhance the reso-nance of the paintings’ colors. From the outset, the Rothko Room was designed as an interlude, one conducive to medita-tion, with Phillips himself referring to it as “a type of ‘chapel.’”³ Rothko took great interest in the museum, visiting it often and even advising on the presentation of his works. on a snowy day in January 1961, while the artist was in Washington for President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, he visited the Phil-lips and noticed that three of his recent works had been added to the Rothko Room. Disapproving of their hanging and light-ing, he instructed Phillips’s assistants, who wanted to please the artist and so immediately obeyed, to make the adjustments.

Returning from his travels a few days later, Phillips insisted on reinstating the original layout but then consented, after negoti-ations with Rothko, to one of his requests. Together with Kath-arine Kuh, Phillips was among the few in the United states who understood and respected the artist and his demands and who had the necessary finesse when interacting with him. “in the soft-edged and rounded rectangles of Mark Rothko’s ma-tured style,” he wrote, “there is an enveloping magic which conveys to receptive observers a sense of being in the midst of greatness.” he further added that Rothko’s colors “cast a spell, lyric or tragic, which fills our existence while the moments lin-ger. They not only pervade our consciousness but also inspire contemplation. our minds are challenged by the relativities;

the relative measures of the two horizontal presences . . . each acting on the other. . . . color-atmosphere in painting is as old as Giovanni Bellini and his mountain backgrounds. . . . But in Rothko there is no pictorial reference at all to remembered ex-perience. What we recall are not memories but old emotions disturbed or resolved.”⁴

The year 1961 marked the climax in Mark Rothko’s life-time of his public recognition as an artist, with a comprehen-sive exhibition of his work at MoMa. in retrospect, Katharine Kuh stressed the importance of the event for the painter him-self, because it “radically changed his point of view. Until then, though he was occasionally skeptical and often pugnacious, he fundamentally believed in himself and more expressly in what he was doing; he knew his own worth.”⁵ on January 18, 1961, a MoMa press release announced that a “comprehensive ex-hibition of paintings by Mark Rothko [would take place] from January 18 to March 12.” it detailed “54 works by the ameri-can artist dating from 1945 to the present. included are eleven murals painted in 1958–1959, exhibited for the first time.”

it mentioned the “highly original style” of the “largely self-taught” artist and foresaw the exhibition as “the largest ever as-sembled,” and noted that it included “4 early water colors from the forties.” But the “keystone” of the event, according to the release, would be the “eleven murals, some 15 feet long, from a series commissioned in 1958. in these dark red canvases,”

it insisted, “Rothko abandoned solid forms for open rectan-gles.” later, in a most poetic style, Peter selz would rave about

“these silent paintings with their enormous, beautiful, opaque surfaces [that] are mirrors, reflecting what the viewer brings with him. in this sense, they can be said to deal directly with human emotions, desires, relationships, for they are mirrors of our fantasies and serve as echoes of our experience. . . . They suggest the entrances to tombs, like the doors to the dwellings of the dead in egyptian pyramids, behind which the sculptors

years of experimentation and torment kept their kings ‘alive’ for eternity in the ka. . . . The whole se-ries of murals bringing to mind an orphic cycle . . . the artist descending to hades to find the eurydice of his vision.”⁶

in breaking his contract for the Four seasons murals, Rothko had irritated the architect Philip Johnson—who in 1930 had founded the Department of architecture and Design at MoMa and who remained one of the most active and gener-ous trustees of the institution. how, then, did the decision of exhibiting Rothko’s abandoned work play in the complex bal-ance of MoMa? The man who contacted Rothko on behalf of the museum to arrange this major retrospective was Peter selz. he had joined the museum’s team three years earlier and immediately drew attention with his original exhibitions: New Images of Man (1959)—in which he dared to show unknown art-ists who celebrated the human form at a time when abstraction seemed to advance ineluctably—and Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960)—an anarchic happening that heralded the rise of performance art, in which the young swiss artist detonated one of his first machines in the MoMa sculpture garden.

Peter selz, along with alan solomon of the Jewish seum and, later, henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Mu-seum of art, was one of new York’s reigning curators in those years.⁷ an academic who received his Ph.D. from the Univer-sity of chicago,⁸ he became chair of the art history depart-ment at Pomona college in california. like Rothko, he was born into a european-Jewish family, but he came from Munich and had immigrated to the United states in 1936, driven out of Germany by the rise of nazism. Visiting museums was an integral part of his family’s culture. in fact, his maternal grand-father—a distant cousin of alfred stieglitz and selz’s men-tor upon arriving in the United states—had worked as an art dealer in Munich. For Rothko, though, who had already en-countered various secular Jews in his professional trajectory—

from Peggy Guggenheim to sidney Janis, Katharine Kuh, and

Phyllis lambert—Peter selz, who prided himself on always working with “artists who were not part of the mainstream,”⁹ would be the one to stage Rothko’s most prestigious exhibition in the United states.

This seemingly auspicious period of the MoMa exhibi-tion, though, also marked the beginning of a painful period for the painter, because both professionally and personally he was feeling exposed. according to his friends, this solo show in this eminent museum created an unprecedented situation for the artist. Rothko felt “like being invited to dwell in Par-nassus,” stanley Kunitz admitted. “Though he didn’t want to show it, i think he was angry with himself for caring so much about it. he did behave like an obsessed man during that whole period.”¹⁰ in fact, according to Dan Rice, his assistant, Rothko

“approached all public displays with great and horrendous tur-moil, great anxiety. . . . Before an opening, he would throw up, more like the behavior of an entertaining artist, an actor. he literally had to go to bed as an exhibition approached. he’d be physically ill . . . just completely torn apart, physically as well as mentally.”¹¹ on the day of the opening, John Fischer recalled, Rothko “began the evening in an agony of stage fright. later, as one guest after another came to congratulate him—and usu-ally to express an almost reverent admiration for his work—he relaxed and started to glow with affability.”¹²

The exhibition was widely reviewed. although most jour-nalists wrote positive texts about it, the reaction on the whole remained lukewarm, signaling that more than one critic was still baffled by the direction the artist had taken. of course, among this group were the usual opponents who continued to dispar-age his art. emily Genauer sarcastically commented on “these works of the ’50s [which] are less paintings, as a painting is generally conceived, than theatrical curtains or handsome wall decorations. [They remained] . . . as decorative as before, but for a funeral parlor.”¹³ in the same arrogant vein, John

cana-years of experimentation and torment

day smugly described “Mr. Rothko’s progressive rejection of all the elements that are the conventional ones in painting, such as line, color, movement and defined spatial relationships,” be-fore concluding that “this is nothing but high-flown nonsense if we begin with the assumption that the audience for painting today is anything but an extremely specialized one.”¹⁴ equally patronizing was Max Kozloff: “aesthetically, there is an exas-perating struggle found throughout the exhibition. . . . When we come to those profoundly dark mural sections of 1958, we find Rothko . . . making his first major mistake. . . . optically, darks do not permit very much resonance at all—a discovery the impressionists made long ago.”¹⁵ as for Robert Goldwater, he warned readers against fantastical interpretations of Roth-ko’s work and welcomed anything that could “relax the visual hold of these canvases, filter their immediacy, and push away their enigmatic, gripping presence.”¹⁶

The antagonistic tone with which Rothko summarized the experience, as reported by John Fischer, was hardly surprising.

“i want to be very explicit about this,” Rothko told him, refer-ring to MoMa. “They need me. i don’t need them. This show will lend dignity to the Museum. it does not lend dignity to me.”¹⁷ But according to the critic irving sandler, Rothko’s tor-ment was subtler and went beyond the exhibition’s reception. he was plagued with doubts not only about the intrinsic meaning of his work, but also about his legitimacy and his responsibility to-ward public expectations. Rothko was facing the dilemma of every creator who suddenly reaches a certain level of visibility, only to find himself abruptly undermined. “Rothko was skepti-cal whether his abstractions, because they were unprecedented, were comprehensible to anyone else,” sandler wrote. “This caused him great anxiety, exacerbated by the hostility they elic-ited. But he also spoke of being surprised not only that there was an audience for his work, but that his audience seemed to be waiting for ‘a voice to speak to them’ and responded totally

to it. There was a revolution in viewing, a ‘well at last, that’s exactly what should have been done.’ This was a reaction based on life not on art. This is the thing to be explained.”¹⁸

sandler was right. “The thing to be explained,” though, re-mained particularly complex for the artist. Furthermore, new events would soon threaten Rothko’s position in the art world, among them the Golden lion awarded to Robert Rauschen-berg at the Venice Biennale in 1964, less than three years after Rothko’s MoMa show, and the emergence of a world market for contemporary american art a decade later.¹⁹ Following the end of World War ii, Rothko epitomized the first generation of american masters, whom the next generation was trying to surpass, erase, and even bury. he was also an immigrant who, like so many critics, dealers, collectors, and curators, now rep-resented an increasingly sizable segment of the art world in the United states. he had (often) experienced periods of rebellion and (occasionally) of attraction toward the institutions in his adopted country, all the while feeling the appeal of europe via his fascination with the masters of the old World and his af-fection for his young British disciples. Ultimately, Rothko rep-resented a type of artist consumed with intellectual, cultural, spiritual, and political concerns. his “anxiety” about the in-telligibility of his work, his “surprise” that it had found such a large audience, and his conviction that a “revolution in view-ing” was at work all could be analyzed, in part, in the context of his genealogy and marked by the geopolitical upheavals of the twentieth century.

in her analysis of the painter’s career, Katharine Kuh iden-tified a connection between the turmoil caused by his MoMa show and his depression of subsequent years. in the decade preceding his suicide, she explained, Rothko “was always re-belling against something . . . whether it was the venality of art dealers, the condescension of museum curators, the timidity of collectors, the indifference of the public, or the pomposity of

years of experimentation and torment

critics. . . . however, his own wings were clipped after he was accepted by the same art establishment he had excoriated. . . . success depleted him, and at the same time the fragile relation-ship between ethics and art no longer absorbed him.”²⁰ i will return to the links between his public success and his private anxiety, and those between his solitary work life and his place in the institutional environment. i will return as well to the ten- sions between art and the marketplace, between the symbolic world and the financial one, and, ultimately, between the old World and the United states.

During this excruciating period, Mark Rothko was saved by another British episode, as he had been two years earlier at the time of the seagram murals—this time by an encounter with Bryan Robertson. During the early sixties, when many be-lieved in “the renaissance of British art,” Robertson had been described as its “leading impresario”²¹ by the Times. When Robertson came up with the idea of presenting the MoMa ex-hibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in london, Rothko was still under the spell of st. ives. he enthusiastically agreed to it, and even planned to travel to england for the opening. a mercurial, inventive, and generous personality, Robertson had taken on the curatorship of the gallery at the age of twenty-seven, ten years before he approached Rothko. he waged a merciless battle against his country’s insularity by organizing spirited presentations of great native artists, past and current, before progressively exposing the British to the new genera-tions from the United states.²² he also pioneered a learning program, based on the conviction that art should be the basis of every education, and not merely an elective. “What i look for in art of any period,” he later wrote, “is imaginative energy, radiance, equilibrium, composure, color, light, vitality, poise, buoyancy, a transcendent ability to soar above life and not be subjugated by it.”²³ in 1960, his signal exhibition This Is To-morrow, with its poster by Richard hamilton, introduced the

concept of Pop art and threw wide open the gates to every-thing that came from across the atlantic.

no wonder that all of Rothko’s requests were addressed with the fullest attention by the peerless Robertson. The small-est details were taken care of, from the color of the walls, which

“should be made considerably off-white and umber and warmed by a little red. if the walls are too white, they are always fight-ing against the pictures which turn greenish because of the predominance of red in the pictures”; to the lighting, which

“whether natural or artificial should not be too strong: the pic-tures have their own inner light and if there is too much light, the color in the picture is washed out and a distortion of their look occurs.” as for the hanging of the works, “the larger pic-tures should all be hung as close to the floor as possible, ideally not more than six inches above it. . . . The exceptions to this are the pictures which . . . were painted as murals . . . : 1. sketch for Mural, no. 1, 1958; 2. Mural sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7, 1958–9;

White and Black on Wine, 1958. The murals were painted at a height of 46 above the floor.” Finally, regarding the grouping of the works: “all works from the earliest in the show of 1949 inclusive were hung as a unit. . . . The murals were hung as a second unit, all together.”²⁴ Rothko’s meticulous instructions required Robertson to display the paintings in a controlled en-vironment, and so he did.

The critics, skeptical at first, one after the other started to praise what became another demonstration of Robertson’s brilliance. The journalist of the Evening Standard admitted that he could “only applaud Mr. Robertson for his courage.

seen en masse, the sincerity and beauty of Rothko’s paintings are undeniable. . . . By some curious alchemy of his own he charges his design with feeling. each canvas has its particular mood, serene or buoyant or menacing. how he manages to conjure emotion out of such austere simplicity is impossible to analyse.”²⁵ others spoke of “ultimate examples of an

untrans-years of experimentation and torment

latable language,”²⁶ and “this brooding, tragic quality hanging over the paintings that finally prevents them from degenerat-ing into nothdegenerat-ing more than decorations.”²⁷

in what would remain as perhaps one of the finest

In document Mark Rothko Toward the Light (Page 190-200)

Years of Experimentation, Recognition, and Torment—The Second Anchoring

in Britain: 1960–1964